2026 Charles Benton Digital Equity Champions Awards

[remarks as prepared for delivery at NetInclusion 2026]

It says here to open with inspiring story from Bears, Cubs, Bulls, Blackhawks, Sky, and/or Red Stars. But under no circumstances mention the White Sox.

I have no idea what any of that means other than I need to yell at a speechwriter. 

I don’t do sportsball; that’s not where I get my inspiration.

I do know we’re in the hometown of Jane Addams and Ida B. Wells, Jeanne Gang and, yes, Oprah Winfrey. There are plenty of people in Chicago who inspire, people past and present, including the people who are currently rising up to protect their neighbors who would otherwise be illegally kidnapped off this city’s streets.

I start with inspiration because in this really rough time for our nation and our world, inspiration goes a long way in helping us all to continue our work of preserving and advancing democracy, equity, justice. 

We gather at this moment to celebrate some dedicated, talented people, but to also be inspired by them and use that spark to carry on our work, whether home for us in Chicago, Washington (DC), Los Angeles, Minneapolis or anywhere else that justice is under fire. The Digital Equity Champions awards recognize the leadership across the full arc of the movement. They honor the people building what comes next. And people who have spent decades making it possible.

Because digital equity is not something you “solve.” It’s something you commit to, across years and generations.  Today, we begin with the future of the field.

If you’ll be so good as to indulge me for a few minutes,  with some inspiration.

Now, the moment you’ve all been waiting for, the award for the Digital Equity Emerging Leader goes to….. 

Dr. Mariette Ayala! While Dr. Ayala makes her way up here, let me tell you about the transformative impact she has had on digital inclusion in Boston and beyond. 

In the last year, Dr. Ayala built Tech Goes Home’s first comprehensive Learning Management System and expanded the curriculum from four digital skills modules to more than 100 culturally competent, community-responsive modules. Through continuous community feedback, she organized these modules into eight clear and accessible learning pathways.

She has created high-quality, barrier-reducing learning opportunities that meet residents where they are, honor cultural context, and support sustainable skill-building. 

Her work has strengthened learner independence, expanded upskilling opportunities, and provided flexible, relevant education for vulnerable and historically marginalized communities. 

As a result, more than 6,000 Boston learners, primarily immigrants, low-income adults, seniors, and families, have accessed these pathways in the past year. 

Mariette’s leadership has reshaped how Tech Goes Home delivers digital literacy and established a scalable model for equitable, community-driven curriculum design.

Equity drives every aspect of Dr. Ayala’s work. Her eight digital literacy pathways were shaped through listening sessions, multilingual feedback, and community consultations to ensure they reflect the cultural, linguistic, and lived experiences of those most excluded from digital access. Her Civic Engagement Course, available in nine languages, empowers new arrivals, migrants, and multilingual families to participate in public life. She actively builds an inclusive culture within TechGoesHome by ensuring representation in content, accessibility across devices, and curriculum that honors each learner’s identity, context, and capacity.

Dr. Ayala is a compassionate, community-rooted leader known for her integrity and commitment to equity. Although she is a new digital equity practitioner, she has a decade of experience serving marginalized populations and brings exceptional research expertise, strong administrative leadership, and deep cultural competency. 

She has supported nonprofits focused on women’s empowerment and families experiencing homelessness and has contributed to national research on educational equity. 

Sadly, as we all recently learned, Tech Goes Home, where Dr. Ayala began this work, has had to close its doors. While the people in Boston and the broader digital inclusion community are poorer for it, Dr. Ayala is hanging out her own shingle. At Skill Bridge Consulting, she will continue to do thoughtful research, evaluation, and curriculum development to advance digital equity. 

Her lived values, academic rigor, and dedication to empowering underserved communities make her an exemplary emerging leader in digital inclusion.

It is my honor to welcome Dr. Mariette Ayala as the 2026 Digital Equity Emerging Leader.

We also recognize two Digital Equity Champions who have been in this for the long haul, who have demonstrated sustained commitment and expertise. 

For nearly 40 years, Bill Callahan has been the “Godfather” of the digital inclusion movement, a title earned not just through his longevity in the field but also through his relentless commitment to exposing the structural roots of the digital divide. While many define digital inclusion simply as “access,” Bill expanded that definition to include “justice” and “accountability.” 

He fundamentally shifted the national conversation from blaming “non-adopters” to scrutinizing “non-deployers.” And his work challenged systemic underinvestment in low-income neighborhoods.

Bill’s most innovative contribution is the concept of “Digital Redlining.” Before his 2017 co-analysis of AT&T’s network in Cleveland, the digital divide was often framed as a problem of demand (people not wanting internet service). Bill helped flip the script. Using FCC and Census data, he demonstrated that major ISPs were systematically excluding low-income neighborhoods from fiber upgrades, leaving them with slow, expensive copper connections while modernizing wealthier suburbs. This wasn’t just research; it was a novel policy tool that forced regulators and companies to confront their deployment bias. 

Bill explicitly links digital equity to racial equity. He was one of the first to provide irrefutable evidence showing that “internet disparity” is often just a modern map of the traditional definition of redlining; lay those maps on one another and they are essentially one and the same. His work on digital redlining moved the diversity, equity, and inclusion conversation in tech beyond “hiring practices” to “infrastructure justice,” demonstrating that systemic neglect closely tracks with the racial makeup of neighborhoods. By challenging these corporate and government policies, he has been a leader in building a culture that refuses to accept “market feasibility” as an excuse for exclusion. His entire career has been dedicated to empowering marginalized populations by giving them not just a connection, but a voice in the policy decisions that affect their lives.

As a leader at NDIA, Bill was instrumental in defining and promoting the “Digital Navigator” model—a framework that uses trusted community guides to help residents get connected. This model is now a nationally recognized best practice.

Today, Bill remains on the frontlines, fighting to protect Ohio’s Digital Equity Act funding. 

Bill Callahan is a champion not simply because he leads Cleveland’s Connect Your Community, but because he has consistently equipped communities—of any size—with the data and arguments they need to advocate for equitable connectivity.

Bill’s work has consistently targeted the “hardest to reach” populations that market forces ignore: low-income urban residents, public housing tenants, and seniors. Specifically, his work in Cleveland neighborhoods like Stockyards and Glenville has brought tangible resources to residents who had been left behind by infrastructure upgrades.

Bill Callahan is defined by his tenacity and his willingness to speak truth to power. Please join me in celebrating his work with the Digital Equity Champion Award.

Our last award today goes to another, in it for the long haul, institution-builder, someone with a vision for the future. The award for Digital Equity Champion goes to… Kami Griffiths. 

Kami Griffiths is the founding Executive Director of digitalLIFT (the artist formerly known as Community Tech Network). She has spent more than two decades building the programs, partnerships, and national momentum needed to advance digital inclusion for those most often left behind. Her work, her mission, is to ensure that every person, regardless of age, income, language, or ability, has the skills, tools, and support to participate fully in today’s digital world. 

Under Kami’s leadership, digitalLIFT has grown from a local Bay Area initiative into a national force serving communities across Texas and California, and scaling services to reach partners nationwide. 

Kami pioneered community-based training models, culturally inclusive curriculum, multilingual instruction, and capacity-building programs that empower hundreds of nonprofit and government partners. 

In 2024, digitalLIFT reached more than 6,000 adult learners and trained nearly 1,000 trainers from government offices, peer nonprofits, libraries, and community health clinics. Kami’s vision has reshaped how the field approaches digital equity: collaborative, data-informed, community-rooted, and deeply human-centered. 

Kami envisions and champions innovative approaches that her team brings to life. She and her team developed one of the nation’s first multilingual, customizable digital literacy curriculum libraries and supported the creation of scalable frameworks, including Train-the-Trainer, Digital Navigator workforce development, and capacity-building models used by partners nationwide. 

Rather than relying on traditional program delivery, Kami fosters cross-sector innovation—encouraging collaboration with health care, housing providers, libraries, and social service agencies to embed digital inclusion into core services. 

Kami’s leadership cultivates the creativity, equity-centered design, and community responsiveness that have made digitalLIFT’s programming both sustainable and influential across the digital inclusion field.

Kami has dedicated her career to helping nonprofits and communities navigate technology—beginning at TechSoup and through years of volunteer service providing hands-on digital skills training. She also served as an adult literacy instructor in New York City, working closely with small groups of learners and deepening her commitment to accessible education. 

Kami is a sought-after national voice on digital equity and inclusion across sectors, including aging services, broadband, public health, and nonprofit technology. 

Kami’s long-term vision is bold: to help one million people gain digital access by training 10,000 community-based trainers. Her leadership has been recognized with awards from NTEN, the Young Nonprofit Professionals Network, and the LINK Americas Foundation.

Ladies and gentlemen, Kami Griffiths, a 2026 Digital Equity Champion.

Dr. Revati Prasad is the new Executive Director of the Benton Institute for Broadband & Society.